ok. so. update. i was accepted to study at the university iberoamericana in mexico city next autumn. i'm signed in as a graphical design student even though my "application" mentioned interest areas as industrial and spacial design.. doesn't really matter - i guess i can move rather freely between departments.

the bigger issue is the need to learn spanish in advance. i was planning on taking a course in spain during the summer, but many people directed me to a more better approach of taking a course before the school starts in mexico city, so now i'm hunting for a course there. at least i'll save the airline tickets and won't pollute, but i would've wanted to visit spain as well.. some day..

in addition to this i needed to buy myself a laptop since the macbook pro i'm now using is from my work. so i got myself a eee 1000he.

only comes with XP, so the first things after i got the wireless up was a visit to www.getfirefox.com and then www.ubuntu.com. the new 9.04 netmix runs really nicely here.

the size, keyboard and battery life are really nice. flash is such a resource hog that some more highres flash sites are slow. otherwise all seems ok. the price is less than 400e so i don't have to be extra careful with it either (good thing in mexico city..).

the idea to buy this i got after our lovely visit to berlin with aino. almost bought a samsung x360 instead, but then came to my senses.. macs are good too, but something is driving me away from them.. maybe it's the fact that i have deal with them everyday in work/school. anyway berlin was excellent. i'll have to write a post on it once i have time to implement map embedding in this blog..

Found from Stack Overflow

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."

"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.

"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone." The man below replies, "You must work in management."

"I do" replies the balloonist, "But how'd you know?"

"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."

Ordered myself a fit-pc from Compulabs from the States. Thanks to the weak dollar it was more cheaper to order it from there than from Sweden. I was first excited about getting myself a Bubba server, which would have been nicer since the shop which makes them is Swedish but technically Bubba is missing a lot of the things that fit-pc has, while consuming more power in the process (not a lot though).

Now I need to come up with a purpose for my fit-pc :). I guess I'll cram a 250GB HDD into it, install gentoo (need performance) and tweak it to run as a wifi-router/backup-server/web-photo-server/automatic-backupper/audio-player/bittorrent-downloader -mean-machine. It's claimed to be powerful enough to play basic divx-clips, but I'm not planning on putting myth or anything on it.

All this under 300e.. let's see how it turns out.

I went to see the Unknown Soldier this week. For those who don't know the piece, it's a Finnish national epoch describing the events during the Continuation War (the war that comes after Winter War during WWII).

The play has generated a lot of controversy. It features - for example - shooting down alive and dead Finnish politics, artists and national icons, such as Ransu. Some people get offended by this and other parts of the play. Just as people got offended decades ago with the original book by Väinö Linna, which depicted the Finnish soldiers in a less "romantic light", i.e. they we're drinking, fleeing from the enemy and all in all being more human than the super-human finnish soldiers in earlier works of art.

I have to say that the play was fantastic. It's a wake-up call for the slumbering Finnish spirit that is fighting for survival in the midst of globalization and commercialization. And I heartly recommend it to all. Especially those that presume that the play is something horrible :)

I just bought the Radiohead album "In Rainbows". I like RH, but I'm not a huge fan. One of the biggest motivators was the new scheme they are using to sell the album: you decide the price. I read on slashdot that 38% of people pay for the album with an average payment falling between $5 and $8. Considering the greedy nature of us humans, I'd say 38% is a good turnout. And btw I paid 10e. Try to top that :)

Enough blabbering.. back to XUL, event loops and threads. A battle I've been fighting for a few days (for those fighting the same battles I recommend this posting (which was surprisingly hard to find)

Haven't been writing much lately. The reason mostly lies in the fact that I've been very busy. The days during the summer were filled with full-time day work at the Medialab and thesis writing/research during the evenings. Rest of the time was partying, exploring Helsinki and enjoying outdoors, and since blogging is not a high priority for me, it was forgotten.

But yesterday I submitted my thesis for review

A huge feeling of relief. I'm quite satisfied with the outcome (all 93 pages of it). For anyone starting to write their thesis, I recommend starting from a very, very small focus area and moving from there. I started BIG, and then had to cut a lot of the material and refocus on a smaller domain.

Hopefully the professor is also satisfied :)

A few weeks back I was employed by the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. So far it seems like a very nice place to work in - relaxed atmosphere, lot's of interesting and nice people, etc..

I even got a Mac 15'' Powerbook as my work machine. At first I was a bit disappointed, because I had to use Mac. Then I found out the very cool features like the omni-present-hibernate (you can leave the computer "on" all the time) and I was pleased for some time.

Then I became disappointed again :). Mostly it's because with Macs it's the Mac way of doing things. I so much prefer the Linux way of DIY, although that is mostly more harder to novice users. And I miss the multiple workspaces and compiz and ... (i know Macs have 3rd party workspace apps, but I've heard they are awful)

Perhaps I'll start using my own age-old-laptop in work next week. Playing with macs was fun and way better than working with Windows, but I'm not converted from Linux :)

Did a bit of fixing on the good old home pages. The most notable improvements are the new user interface picture gallery and the new project showcases.

Me and Hannu decided to become guerrillas and went lining up for a Nintendo Wii on when it was published here on 8.12.

All the Wiis have been sold out so far so we wanted to be sure about getting one... so we woke up at 5am and went in front of Gigantti. Gigantti opened up at 10am so we had about four hours of waiting to do.. Hannu took a bunch of photos, we played footbag, stood in line.

Around 7:30 we noticed that people started to line up in front of the Prisma store next to Gigantti. I heard that there might be some Wiis there as well and because it opens already at 8am I went to line there around 7:40. And at 8:00 I was the first one in the line who DIDN'T get a Wii :(. Frustrated I went back to the Gigantti line which Hannu was holding up.

We waited there.. there were only a few of us. Me, Hannu and my professor (can't reveal his name because he was lining to get one for his kids as a Christmas present). Other people showed up around 9:00am. All in all there were around 18 people lining for a Wii before the store opened at 10am.

[rant] Bloody Gigantti overcharged 20e (289e instead of the basic 269e) and they didn't even have them in stock, had to come back later that day to collect mine. Lowered my opinion of Gigantti (can't get much lower..). [/rant]

Overall I have to say the lining-culture in Tampere sucked :). We were the only hardcore guys (some would say "stupid") lining there from 6am. I heard in London some people lined from Tuesday..

But I got my Wii and it kicks ass and makes your hands hurt

Just came back from the tattoo shop "Halo". After one and half hours of getting punctured, my old tattoo finally got upgraded :)
The artist in Halo was very talented and nice. Overall the experience was a lot more positive than the first tattooing in Kuopio (at Tino's). Even the pain of getting stinged with a small needle hundred times per second got quite pleasant after the first 30 minutes.

Now if the wounds would just heal quickly..

Well my employment for the summer is looking quite smooth this year: just got hired to develop the environment for IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics ). This should take me about one month and then after that I can start really working on gDesklets with the support from COSS.

I'm thinking about using the Ubuntu Dapper live-cd for the IOI-environment.. I know it's a bit experimental, but asking around #ubuntu-fi let me to believe that it should work fine. Not only would Dapper give a superb, state-of-the-art linux environment, it would also offer the Espresso installer that makes it possible to install the distribution from the LiveCD into the hardrive - a feature that was missed with the previous liveCD based on Morphix.

Well see.. all this experimenting will probably backfire on me like usual :)

Tight kesäkoodi-finals.. eight people got in, seven showed up (no idea why one didn't), five got picked, and I was one of them! Hooray! Now I get to work on gDesklets all summer. Something I would have done (a bit) anyway.

I'll create a new category on the blog for reporting on how my gDesklets work is progressing.

And I got a 250GB LaCie (Porsche design :-* ) USB-hardrive. That combined with the nice and simple backup utility "SBackup" should keep my /home and all the work safe.

I should be working on my Agent software article, but I think I'll hack a little on KISSsmilies..

It was a nice weekend, if you don't count the fact that my /home was destroyed... Buying a (microsoft) XBox 360 gamepad so that we could play a game with Tuomas forced me to upgrade my WinXP to SP2 (I know, long due). This upgrade failed. Windows gave a brilliant error report: "incorrect parameter" and failed to start. As a nice side-effect it distorted the partition table somehow and destroyed my home-partition. F*cking windows.

Thank god I had some backups, but they're a month old. This means all my gdesklets work is lost (and movies, music, configurations for all the programs).. We'll I guess it's time to buy a usb-harddrive for better backups.

And tomorrow I have the COSS-summercode finals.. hope I make it.

I had to install Ubuntu Dapper to get my hands on gstreamer 0.10. A friend of mine had success with XGL/Compiz with ATI and I decided to give it a try since it's so easy with Dapper. I have to say it is incredible. Thanks to David Reveman and all the other giants for making this possible!!


It made my desktop quicker, prettier and more easy to use (expose effects, etc.). Here's a screenie for explanation. The effect in question is the switching of workspaces. Soundgarden is playing between. Click on it to get a bigger view.

Although it's still alpha software, it works nicely. A few complaints still: windows from all workspaces show up in alt-tab-switcher and getting video to work required some tweaking. This tweaking resulted in the problem that window-decoration-cross won't close mplayer (have to press q). These are minor issues. On the whole I have to say this is the best thing I've seen on Linux in a long time! At last my desktop does not pale in comparison to Mac OS X (not to mention windows :) ).

[rant]The problem using Linux is that I can't test my pages with M$ Internet Exploder :-P. Again I noticed that IE doesn't respect background images and colors used at the same time (hence the grey bits in the corners) and style-definitions for the submenu links we're creatively ignored.

It should be fixed now. Can't really promise anything, since I can't test it on IE (too lazy to boot into windows).

I'm not going to slap one of those "This page is best viewed with blaablaa" -tags here! No way! Although I'm highly tempted. [/rant]

Sorry 99.5% of the world. Next bit is in finnish.
[finnish]
TEHTÄVÄNANTO:
Paljastan viisi omituista tapaani/piirrettäni.
Tämän jälkeen valitsen seuraavat viisi ihmistä, jotka haastan tekemään saman perästä(paljastamaan viisi outoa tapaansa omaan päiväkirjaansa).
Heidän tulee myös kirjoittaa nämä säännöt merkintäänsä.
Linkitän haastamani ihmiset tämän merkinnän loppuun ja käyn ilmoittamassa heidän kommenttilaatikkoihinsa haasteesta ja tästä merkinnästä. :>

(pasifistinen luonteeni estää minua haastamasta ketään! the vicious circle shall end here! - toim.huom)

1.(Suuri) Osa moottoripyörällä ajon viehätyksestä on se, että se on minusta (hieman)pelottavaa.

2. Omistin pienenä oman imurin. Nykyään en enää pidä niin siivouksesta.

3. Kärsin www-OCD:stä (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder[sic?]) - kotisivujen ulkomuoto muuttuu näköjään vähintään 2 kertaa vuodessa :-O

4. Olen oikeasti vedenalainen teini-samurai-mörkö.

5. Olen erittäin huono keksimään itsestäni huonoja tai outoja puolia, vaikka niitä kyllä varmaan löytyy roppakaupalla. Tietenkin "oudot puoleni" ovat mielestäni aivan normaaleja ja "huonot puolet" vaan erinäköisiä vahvuuksia (it's not a bug, it's a feature!) :).

[/finnish]

It's that time of year again. Scream, kick, bite and crawl to get yer ass employed for the summer. That means that I'll try to improve this site a bit, finish off Pet Hotel Receptionist (almost done) and create a nice, appealing CV (without cheating ;) )

.. And I'll have to get a job because I just paid taxes from my latest projectsalary with a nice tax percent of 34%. Damn taxofficials messed up my taxcard in Kuopio :-P. I'll get my money back, but not until christmas.

It's 2006 and I survived the new year's eve celebrations :). Happy new year to everyone!

Using the newest-state-of-the-art software isn't always the best solution... I tried the newest software suspend on my laptop and it screwed my /, meaning I couldn't boot my linux anymore. Thank god I have my home-directories on a separate partition!

Anyway. All is well now. Running a fresh Ubuntu 5.10 linux now (didn't really have the time or energy to go through a stage 1 gentoo install (and stage 3 is only for pussies ;) ) ). I don't recommend trying the 2.2-rc1 suspend on your only computer.. It seems to be reiserfs-related.. I'm sure Nigel will fix it soon.

So I took part in the SymbianRoadshow-training/recruitment day offered by Vega technologies. Learned quite a lot of stuff about symbian, played around with a few phones (even one that wasn't available on the market yet), broke some example code the lecturer had done and finally drank beer, ate pizza and enjoyed a nice relaxing sauna evening. All this paid by Vega.

I probably won't work for them in the future (symbian didn't look so "developer-friendly", nor am I so interested in symbian programming), but at least they succeeded in giving a nice image of the business. I'm sure to recommend it to anyone looking for a developer job in symbian programming. Thanks for the education, pizza, beer and the sauna Vega!

Well.. I wasn't completely satisfied with the outlook (not sure if I'm satisfied now, but it's at least better) and did some tweaking.
Enough playing around with bluefish.. now I'll have to get to work with the Graphical Interfaces -coursework (and boot into windows :( ).

Ok. So here are the new pages. Changed the layout, added some functionality (this blog for instance) and updated everything. The old pages are still viewable in the "other"-section (including some very ugly flash-designs :) ) This page is powered by KISS-stuff. See "projects" if you need a very simple blog like this.